Website Design and Developer Tools – DecoNetwork FAQs

This series highlights commonly asked questions among DecoNetwork clients over the past week. We will be posting the most common questions of the past week each Thursday with commentary and links to DecoNetwork Help Articles, videos, and other blog posts to better assist you in finding the resources you need.

This week, we’re simply touching on some basic website setup for a quick holiday refresher course. Check out the help articles linked throughout and let us know if this helps you get your sites started!

Thanks for reading!

How do I get started designing my website?

While we know that getting started in DecoNetwork is a lot to handle, and a lot of it isn’t the “pretty” work of building your business, getting started and getting your first, or your fiftieth, site up and running is an exciting feeling. To help you not get overwhelmed, we revamped our website builder to be more interactive, more intuitive, and more in line with what you, our clients, want. With that said, there are a few tips and tricks you can use to get better and faster at building simple, but unique sites in the DecoNetwork platform.

Getting your site “on brand”

To begin setting your site to match your, or your clients, current branding, simply go to the website editor, select Design, and then select Style Editor. This menu will allow you to change colors, fonts, buttons, and more across your site before you even touch the individual pages themselves. This is the first place that many of our support staff recommend, simply because it allows you to make big changes with very little effort.

Turning off pages you (and your clients) don’t need

To turn off the pages you simply do not need or will not use, stay in the website editor and choose the menu option on the left titled “Pages”. Once you see a list of the pages on your site, choose the page you no longer want available. Upon loading, a black bar at the bottom of the page will render, and you can uncheck the box titled “Show in Menu”. This will remove it from the menu and it will no longer be visible to your clients.

A couple notes on this: There is a way to “turn off” the page, however, it is not recommended for most of the pre-existing pages, as turning those off can cause issues with other widgets in the site. Also, be sure to save the page and Publish your changes in order to make them visible on your live site.

Copying pages you’ve created

Let’s say you’ve been in the website editor for a while and you’ve made the perfect page. You’re excited about it, and now, you just need to duplicate it in order to change something minor and use that same page in another place on your site. Well, DecoNetwork offers the ability to copy an existing page onto your site simply with the click of a button. To do so, simply go into the website editor, choose the Pages option on the left, then click Copy at the end of the line where the page you want to duplicate is listed. You’ll see a copy of the page pop up in the Pages list and it will be ready to edit.

Do I need a developer to build my website?

To be honest, this is a bit of a complicated question. The short answer is No, you do not need a developer to build your site in DecoNetwork, but there are some advantages to having one around.

For instance, if you want to embed something in your site from an external site, you are welcome to do so, however, you will need a basic understanding of HTML and possibly CSS. There are two locations to edit the HTML of the page, one of those in the website editor by simply embedding an HTML widget (Widgets > HTML), and the other in the Admin panel under Edit Website (Edit Website > Customize Template HTML). With CSS, there are also a couple of places to edit the CSS of a page, in the widgets themselves (Widget Settings > Advanced), and in the template settings (Admin > Edit Website > Customize Template CSS).

There are also non-website related reasons you may want to talk with a developer, such as editing your Email and Order Templates to match your branding or existing formatting, working with specific variables using javascript, or working within our APIs to integrate DecoNetwork elsewhere. Ultimately, whether you need a developer is entirely up to you.

If you are looking for someone to help you get your site set up or even to help with something small, check out our DecoPro service.

Does DecoNetwork offer API access?

Yes, DecoNetwork does offer API access on two levels. The first is our Order Management API, which allows for external management of orders and their statuses. The second is our External Cart API, which allows for the integration of DecoNetwork’s software and products into an external shopping cart system. While DecoNetwork does offer both of these types of API access, we do recommend consulting or hiring a developer to get your integration set up, as it can be a bit tedious and require a bit more knowledge of coding to integrate. Before you get started using the API, be sure to check out the prerequisites for the API you’re looking at to ensure you have the correct account type and you’ve downloaded all of the requisite data.